How to Write a Book

Were you recently inspired to write a book after reading Owen Gregory’s compendium of author insights? Maybe so inspired to strike out on your own and self-publish?

Based on personal experience, writing a book is hard. It requires a great deal of research, experience, and patience. To be able to consolidate your thoughts and what you’ve learned into a sensible and readable tome is an admirable feat. To decide to self-publish and take on yourself all of the design, printing, distribution, and so much more is tantamount to insanity. Again, based on personal experience.

So, why might you want to self-publish?

If you’ve spent many a late night doing cross-browser testing just to know that your site works flawlessly in twenty-four different browsers — including Mosaic, of course — then maybe you’ll understand the fun that comes from doing it all.

Working with a publisher, you’re left to focus on one core thing: writing. That’s a good thing. A good publisher has the right resources to help you get your idea polished and the distribution network to get your book on store shelves around the world. It’s a very proud moment to be able to walk into a book store and see your book sitting there on the shelf.

Self-publishing can also be a wonderful process as you get to own it from beginning to end. Every decision is yours and if you’re a control freak like me, this can be a very rewarding experience.

While there are many aspects to self-publishing, I’m going to speak to just one of them: creating an ebook.

Formats

In creating an ebook, you first need to decide what formats you wish to support. There are three main formats, each with their own pros and cons:

PDF

EPUB

MOBI

PDFs are supported on almost every device (Windows, Mac, Kindle, iPad, Android, etc.) and can even be a stepping stone to creating a print version of your book. PDFs allow for full typographic and design control, but at the cost of needing to fit things into a predefined page layout. Is it US Letter or A4? Or is it a format that isn’t easily printed by readers on their home printers?

EPUB is a more fluid format that is supported by the Apple iPad, iPhone, and now on the desktop with OS X Mavericks. It’s also supported by Google Play for Android devices. While EPUB is supported on other devices, you’re likely to choose EPUB because you’re targeting your book at the Apple audience. The EPUB format is HTML-based with support for some CSS and even video and interactive elements. You can create very rich and exciting experiences using the EPUB format that just aren’t possible with PDF or MOBI. However, if you decide to support multiple file formats, you’ll likely find — as I did — that a consistent experience between all formats is easier to build and maintain, and therefore the extra benefits of interactivity go out the window.

MOBI is a format originally developed for the Mobipocket Reader but more popularly supported by the Amazon Kindle. If you’re looking to attract the Kindle audience or publish to Amazon via the Kindle Direct Publishing platform then the HTML-based MOBI format is the format you’ll want to go with.

Distribution will probably factor in heavily with what format you decide to go with. Many people I know who self-publish go with PDF only due to its ubiquity.

If you want to garner a wider audience by distributing via Amazon or the iBookstore then you’ll need to think about supporting all three formats (as I did).

What tools should I use?

I spent a lot of time figuring out the right toolset and finally got something that suits me just right.

In the past, when working with a publisher, I was given a Microsoft Word template that was passed back and forth between myself, the editor, and tech reviewer. This template has been the bane of any book writer that I’ve spoken to. Not every publisher is like that, though. Some publishers, like O’Reilly, use DocBook, an XML-based format that can be converted into PDF, EPUB, and MOBI.

Publishers already have a style guide and whether it’s DocBook or a Word template, they have the tools already in place to easily convert your work into multiple formats.

Self-publishing means that you’ll likely have to do a lot of tweaking to get things looking and working the way you want them to. I tried DocBook and the open source export tools didn’t create HTML to my liking. Fixing even the most mundane things required fiddling with XSL transformations for hours on end. Not the way I like to spend my time. I can only imagine the hoops I would’ve had to go through to get a PDF to look half-decent.

Tools like Pages or Scrivener offer up the ability to publish to multiple formats, too, but none offered me the control over the output that I truly desired. Have a mentioned that I’m a control freak?

I ended up writing my book using a technology that I already knew quite well: HTML. By writing in HTML, I already had something that I could post on my website, use for the EPUB and use for the MOBI format. All without having to change a thing. (That’s right: the same HTML that is used on SMACSS.com is used in the EPUB and is used in the MOBI.)

What about PDF? I could open up the HTML in a web browser, choose Save as PDF and be done with it but let’s face it: the filename and date attached to every single page doesn’t exactly scream professional. Web browsers actually do a surprisingly poor job with supporting the CSS paged media spec.

I had resorted to copying and pasting the content into Pages and saving as PDF from there. It wasn’t elegant but it worked. However, any changes to my HTML source required redoing those changes in Pages, as well.

Then I met my Prince Charming: Prince XML. It’s pricey but it works incredibly well. It takes HTML and CSS (that very format I’ve been using for all of my other file formats) and will generate a PDF via a command line interface. Prince supports CSS paged media including headers, footers, page counts, and alternating page styles.

From one format, HTML, I can now easily publish to PDF, MOBI, and EPUB, and even my website. I use the PDF version to send to the printer along with cover art to be bound and ready to ship around the world. It’s amazing how versatile HTML (and CSS) is.

Once all your files are in place, you’ll need to create the EPUB file by running two commands (on OS X, at least):

zip -X0 your-ebook.epub mimetype
zip -Xur9D your-ebook.epub *

The mimetype needs to be the first file inside the ZIP file and therefore gets added first. Then, the rest of the files are added.

I’ve added a function to my .bash_profile to make this even easier:

function epub()
{
zip -q0X $@ mimetype; zip -qXr9D $@ *
}

Then, within the folder from which I want to create an ebook, I just run epub your-ebook.epub from the Terminal command line and the EPUB file should be ready to go.

Creating the MOBI

We have our EPUB and we have our PDF. The last step is the MOBI file. For this, I call upon Calibre. Calibre can be used as a reader and as a library but I use it exclusively to export my EPUB files to MOBI.

Calibre includes a command line utility to convert from EPUB to MOBI. (To install the command line tools, go to Preferences > Advanced > Miscellaneous and click Install Command Line Tools.)

ebook-convert your-ebook.epub your-ebook.mobi

Spread the joy

Now that you have all of your different file formats, you need to get them into the hands of people who want to (ho-ho-hopefully) buy your book!

Some publishers, like PragProg and O’Reilly will also add self-published books to their roster if they feel it’s a good fit for their audience.

With any distribution, you’ll have to give up a percentage of your sales—from 30% to 70% of each sale, so consider your options wisely.

Of course, you can always open your own online store and reap as much of the revenue as possible, assuming you can get the traffic to your site. Handling your own distribution allows you to create a deeper one-on-one connection with your customers, something that is impossible with other distribution channels since you don’t get customer information through other services—even though you are giving them a huge chunk of your sales!

Go forth and prosper

There’s a lot of thought and time that goes into writing a book and just as much thought and time can go into creating, publishing, and marketing your book once you’re done.

In the end, self-publishing can be a very rewarding process and well worth the time that goes into it.

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